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AT&T’s 1 Gigabit “GigaPower” Fiber Network in Austin goes live

AT&T, the incumbent provider of telephone service in Austin, TX, has announced that they have brought online their first gigabit fiber to the home installations in Austin, dubbed GigaPower. At the time of launch, the speeds are a maximum of 300 mbps; however, they plan to bring up those speeds to a full gigabit in 2014.

Austin, TX is a rather interesting place for AT&T to decide to launch their gigabit internet service as Austin is also one of the recently selected cities slated to get Google Fiber. On their website for GigaPower, AT&T even offers an option for users to “vote” up their neighborhoods like Google Fiber. AT&T denies that Google Fiber influenced their decision in launching a fiber network in Austin; however, even if this is the case, Google Fiber’s launch has probably made AT&T think more about their fiber installations and expand them farther than they most likely would have originally.

This will be interesting to see as more and more people sign up for AT&T’s new GigaPower service and can start to testify for how well the service functions in real world conditions. If executed right, GigaPower could give a well functioning alternative to Google Fiber for Austin residents.

You’re right, I did not think to include that when writing the article, which I apologize for. However, many ISPs already do this without informing the consumer. The only difference in this scenario is that AT&T flat out said they were going to do deep packet inspection,

I can give you the argument of deep packet inspection for something under a warrant but deep packet inspection for commercial usage is illegal unless it is clearly stated in the terms of usage agreements.